This blog deals with issues pertaining to natural dignity and worth that all humanity deserves under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. You will find articles about Life issues pertinent to Christian living and faith.

“Our once great western Christian civilization is dying. If this matters to followers of Jesus Christ, then we must set aside our denominational differences and work together to strengthen the things that remain and reclaim what has been lost. Evangelicals and Catholics must stand together to re-establish that former Christian culture and moral consensus. We have the numbers and the organization but the question is this: Do we have the will to win this present spiritual battle for Jesus Christ against secularism? Will we prayerfully and cooperatively work toward a new Christian spiritual revival ― or will we choose to hunker down in our churches and denominationalisms and watch everything sink into the spiritual and moral abyss of a New Dark Age?” - Mark Davis Pickup

Thursday, November 10, 2016

REMEMBRANCE DAY AND OUR DYING CHRISTIAN HERITAGE

School
children rose from their desks to stand for two minutes silence in memory of soldiers who made the
ultimate sacrifice in two World Wars. We children stood tight-lipped and gazed at the Red Ensign flag at the front of the classroom.
Every creak, children shuffling and even slight noises from the school’s ventilation
system became magnified during our solemn silence. It happened every November
11th. We children were told to remember.

But
how could we “remember” when the last World War ended eight years before most of us were born?

My father
in England in 1942

As
an elementary school student during the early 1960s, I gave the brief ceremony
all the respect I could muster in my small mind. I knew something terrible had
happened. My father was a veteran of the Second World War. He occasionally told
me about the desperate struggle that occurred during 1939-1945 against the
Nazis.

British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill had summed up the stakes in his 1940 address to
the government and the British people about what became known as the Battle of Britain:

British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill

“I
expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the
survival of Christian civilization. ... If we can stand up to him, [Adolf
Hitler] all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into
broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the
United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into
the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted by
the lights of perverted science.”

These
words conveyed the desperate hour in which they were spoken. We can tell that
there was a Christian civilization that was threatened. I can find no record of
howls of protest in the British House of Commons decrying Churchill’s assertion
that western civilization was Christian. It was. And my father’s generation was
prepared to put everything on the line – even their lives – to defend it. In
fact, 400,000 American, 326,000 British and more than 43,000 Canadian soldiers
did just that. Such a terrible sacrifice!

The
Christian civilization Churchill spoke of had spawned the institutions,
religion, laws and legal traditions, culture and mores that made western civilization great. But within two
generations after the Second World War, that Christian civilization to which
Winston Churchill referred has been largely destroyed. It hasn’t been destroyed
by guns but by ideas. Secularism has dismantled it.

The
baby-boomer generation that immediately followed the War years are largely
responsible for what the Third Reich could not do through armed conflict. I am
told that much of Europe has forsaken Christianity, their great cathedrals sit
empty. Large portions of European populations no longer seem to care for the
things of God.

The
poison of liberal secularism is changing America and Canada too. We have gone from being Christian countries to
being anti-Christian. The new liberal establishment in government and the media
and secularists are even trying to revise history by saying we never were
Christian. The “broad sunlit uplands” we
inherited at such a great cost are marred by threatening storm clouds of a new
Dark Age of steely secularism. We are sinking into its abyss.What’s shocking is the new Dark Age looks
remarkably similar to Winston Churchill’s prediction. The old man was right!

We
have our own holocaust of rampant abortion that has claimed millions more lives
than the Nazi holocaust against the Jews. Euthanasia against the sick and
disabled is being practised. The perverted science like cloning and embryonic
stem cell research is upon us ― and some of it is even funded by governments we
elect!

Any semblance of a previous Judeo-Christian
moral consensus that guided previous generations is all but gone and western
civilization is being left to drift in relativism and vague but dangerous
shifting ground of unfettered personal license.

Institutions
previously held dear and cherished (like marriage) are being redefined,
disassembled or abandoned.

We
should not be surprised. This is what happens when people and nations abandon
God. That’s the bad news; the good news is that there are still people, within
the wayward culture, who have not forsaken Christ or Christian morality.It is up to those people to strengthen the
things that remain and reclaim that which has been lost.

This
is a darkening time when faithful Christians are called to hold up the light of
Christ and point the way back to a culture that has lost its Christian moorings. Do not lose heart when people who prefer
darkness speak ill of you. They spoke ill of Christ too. Great is your reward
in heaven.